Merf. Thinking is Hard.

For me, Heart of Darkness is a horror story about doubt. Not ordinary personal doubt, though; rather the quiet, metaphysical doubt that’s gnawed at us oh-so-quietly and oh-so-persistently since the dawn of the nineteenth century. That nasty feeling that, as the modern age has disassociated us all from everything that bound us to the past, and the march of science and technology has reimaged us as a chemical-dependant ape that got lucky, that feeling that whispers in our ear and tells us that there is nothing left in the world to depend on or look to for guidance but ourselves, and that we are not up to the job. Heart of Darkness is a journey to this revelation. As Marlow travels down the river, the traditional symbols of modern Western life, technology, organization, and the like, are shown to be unable to make any impression on the wilderness, while the men he encounters grow increasingly blinkered and selfish as a reaction to that failure. The further he progresses, the fewer signs of Western life he finds. At the climax, he encounters Kurtz, the greatest doubter of all, a “hollow man” who had no beliefs himself, but could follow the rules of civilization and be amply rewarded for doing so, a man who was sent away from everything and told to make something all by himself. And in response he left the human race. The terror of Kurtz is compounded by Marlow’s narration, which makes it clear that Kurtz’s state was not an aberration, but a potentiality that exists within all of us. While Apocalypse Now adapted Conrad’s story into a critique of the Vietnam War, it kept this central terror, if rephrased in military terms.

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To appreciate the setting of Spec Ops: The Line, you need to look at the game with an eye to the absurd. The absurd has always been an integral part of Heart of Darkness, an effective shorthand for showing the inadequacy of Western modernity’s power. Conrad’s novella was modest in its absurdity, imagining colonial outposts with tipped-over locomotives and piles of rusting rails representing the fruits of a rail-building initiative, as well as demolition teams blowing holes into mountains because they have nothing better to do with their time. Apocalypse Now, of course, went full-gonzo with its absurdity, with air cavalry colonels who see the war as a surfing vacation, Playboy shows held on artificially-built helipads on the banks of rivers which threaten to degenerate into mass rape, and bridges deep in enemy territory that are held for no real strategic reason. While those two stories built set pieces to showcase the ludicrous nature of their worlds, The Line does so more subtly by letting Dubai speak for itself. To be cruel for a moment, Dubai is a fucking weird place. To get a hint of what it is like, imagine your hometown, only with every building from before 1980 removed, and with 8000 times the amount of money it has now. Completely artificial communities are nothing new, but this is ridiculous. Dubai used to have a puddle of oil and some trade with Pahlavi Persia and India, but its boom in the past few decades has been due to it rebranding itself as a luxury tourism destination and as a shopping center. There really isn’t much of a “past” to Dubai; the city is dominated by immense glittering skyscrapers, erupting out of the ground without rhyme or reason. It is also a very international city, in the way that places like Jakarta, Manila, and Shanghai (to choose at random) have that weird identity-free “American” feel to them.

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At this point in the proceedings, there are any number of places I could go to discuss Spec Ops: The Line. I could elaborate how the game could be seen as an allegory of the hubris of the elite hypercapitalist world culture that has been growing since the 1980s and whose destruction may most fervently by those who live and benefit the most from that order. Arguments could be made that the game is a critique of American foreign policy, specifically the need to act as a “redeemer nation” to the rest of the world, the futile desire to control and stage-manage every situation, as well as that nasty impulse to condone any act, up to and including the deaths of others, in the name of saving face. If one were so inclined, one could also tack on an argument of how the fact that the residents of Dubai have fairly little presence in the game is a clever allegory for the fact that the United States seemed to be surprisingly uninterested in interacting with actual Iraqis during the Iraq War, and how a lot of the occupation appears to have been designed to keep the Americans and the Iraqis far away from one another. A little bit of mileage could also be gained from the few hints the game drops regarding the unhappy relationship between the rulers of Dubai and the people that inhabit their city that is posited in a few throwaway references. Finally, one could also argue that the emblem Konrad takes up, an American flag with the fifty stars and blue canton blacked out, is a reference to the Russian Suprematist Kasimir Malevich’s famous work Black Square, and that Konrad’s actions could be seen, in the context of their relation to their origins in the original Heart of Darkness and in Malevich’s art theory, as a way to overcome of the processes causing doubt and chaos in his environment by replicating them inside himself and his men and accelerating them until they moved beyond the apocalypse and post-apocalypse into a realm where all that exists is black forms of pure contemplation that resemble the initial stirrings of “primitive art”.